The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the “alternative interrogation methods” that their captors used to get them to talk.

The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation’s most sensitive national security secrets and that their release — even to the detainees’ own attorneys — “could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage.”

[snip]

Because Khan “was detained by CIA in this program, he may have come into possession of information, including locations of detention, conditions of detention, and alternative interrogation techniques that is classified at the TOP SECRET//SCI level,” an affidavit from CIA Information Review Officer Marilyn A. Dorn states…

This highlights the fundamental corruption of the human soul that torture causes. We know it’s wrong, so not only do we torture prisoners, but we then do what we must to conceal what we’ve done. And then we try to conceal even that. Torture and secrecy, secrecy and torture, world without end.

That’s not America. At least, it shouldn’t be.

Nope. America, the real America, the America I was born and raised in, is the home of patriots willing to pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. It’s a nation that faced the Civil War, and the Great Depression. It’s a nation that waded ashore on Omaha Beach, and raised the flag on Iwo Jima. It’s a nation that landed on the Moon.

George Bush wants to turn my America into a very different sort of country, into a pissant little dictatorship, fearful of the outside world, fearful of its own people, fearful of the truth. George Bush’s America would never have dared to sign the Declaration of Independence, or travel with Lewis and Clark to the Pacific, or free the slaves, or defeat Hitler, or ride a rocket to another world. George Bush’s America would have peed on itself in the face of any of those terrors.